Transmedia Research Institute
Transmedia Research Institute starts from a near future in which technology no longer surrounds the human body and runs through it instead. Umanesimo Artificiale's school, research lab and residency in one, run between Pesaro and Fano, it brings artists together to work on the body, on machines and on what lies past the human, and to ask what a person is once that boundary is gone.
For the 2024 semester and the 2025 summer school, its public face is a website, a visual system and a film that take the premise literally.
A tutor rebuilt from a single photograph, and the 2024 programme.
On the website the tutors are treated the way the programme treats bodies. Each appears as a name, a bio, a photograph and a 3D presence rebuilt from that one photograph. In 2024 the technique was months old, so a tutor looks solid from one side and comes apart from another, and a school about bodies beyond the human introduces its teachers as bodies only partly held together.
The film at Neologia in Turin, and three of its sequences.
The film states the premise without a single word. Transition, Transformation & Transcendence, a short visual essay for the 2024 open call Semester of Bits & Atoms, imagines that the seal of flesh keeping the human apart from the physical and virtual layers of reality has been hacked, and that technology now runs through the body, computed on it, inside it and around it.
It is made for two intelligences that share only the electrical impulses that run them, the visual cortex and the vision model, so it speaks in light: signals a fraction of a second long, aimed at the cortex, as if the image skipped the eyes and was written straight into the brain. It later travelled on its own, shown at Neologia at Graphic Days in Turin.
Credits
Client: Umanesimo Artificiale
Concept and programme: Filippo Rosati
Scope: Website, visual identity, motion, film
Visual identity and film: Davide Marcianesi